The Ultimate Weight Loss Cause (Hormones vs. Calories)
Weight loss is often considered just a calorie problem, but counting calories has been shown NOT to aid in weight loss. Instead, if you want to learn how to lose weight for good...
Fasting and Growth Hormone
Growth hormone decreases with age Growth hormone maintains lean mass including muscles and bones Injecting artificial growth hormone causes side effects like high blood sugars and enlarged hearts Fasting naturally boosts growth hormone Fasting increases autophagy (breakdown of protein) while stimulating growth resulting in rejuvenation of tissues By Jason Fung, M.D., Co-founder of The Fasting...
Fructose causes insulin resistance – Hormonal Obesity XXXII
The metabolism of excessive amounts of fructose leads to fatty liver, which is a key step in the development of insulin resistance, as we saw in our last post. Is there evidence that consumption of fructose leads to insulin resistance? In a word - yes. As far back as 1980, there were studies linking the...
The Common Currency
Currency (money) is useful because it represents mutually agreed upon means of measurement and exchange. That is, if we all accept American dollars as our currency of exchange, then items as disparate as a bus or an onion can be all measured in the same units. The bus is expensive and costs more dollars and the...
Power: Fasting vs Low Carb – Fasting 26
What's the difference in power between fasting and LowCarb High Fat (LCHF)? Sometimes it feels like arguing whether Batman or Superman is more powerful (Superman, of course). But they're both superheros, and the point of both these dietary superhero regimens is to lower insulin. This stems from a rational examination about the causes of obesity and type...
Thoughts on the Pritikin Diet
Denise Minger wrote a very thought provoking post on the very low fat Pritikin Diet and how it can help reduce disease including diabetes and cancer. In the first part, I wrote my thoughts on the Kempner Rice diet here. The Pritikin diet is primarily composed of high fibre, high carbohydrate, low-fat, plant based foods....
Inflammation and T2D – T2D Part 1
This week I’d like to discuss type 2 diabetes (T2D) and inflammation. Usually I try to follow topics sequentially, but I was reviewing an article about type 2 diabetes and inflammation and thought it was quite interesting. The results of a large trial (TECOS) were released in June 2015 and illustrates once again the futility...
Why Can’t I Lose Weight? – HTLW 12
Why can't I lose weight? I hear this question all the time. It's usually followed by something like "my best friend SkinnyBitch used this internet diet and lost 30 pounds. Why can't I?" The basic question is something like this. If their friend uses a LCHF diet to lose weight, why doesn't it work for...
Nutritionism’s Great Blunder
Dr. Ancel Keys has been accused of many great nutritional crimes, but his greatest blunder was the inadvertent triumph of nutritionism. Dr. Keys was one of the great proponents of saturated fat as one of the main determinants of the epidemic of coronary disease in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This led directly to the low...
Do All Diets Fail? – How to Lose Weight XI
All diets fail. Long term dieting is sheer futility. After initial weight loss, the dreaded plateau appears, followed by the even more dreaded weight regain. What do I mean? Weight loss follows the same basic curve so familiar to dieters the world over. Whether it is the Mediterranean, the Atkins, or even the old fashioned...
Fibre reduces Insulin – How To Lose Weight X
When we consider the nutritional benefits of food, we think about the vitamins, minerals and nutrients they contain. We think about components in the food that nourish the body. Fibre is completely different. The key to understanding fibre’s effect is to realize that the benefit lies not as a nutrient, but as an anti-nutrient. Fibre...
Fibre – How To Lose Weight IX
Fibre is the non-digestible part of food, usually a carbohydrate. A more formal definition is the “dietary constituents that are not enzymatically degraded to absorbable subunits in the stomach and small intestine”. These are generally plant foods, but occasional animal foods such as liver glycogen are included. Common types of fibre include cellulose, hemicellulose, pectins,...
